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How important is your "landing" page(s) ??

Some of us budding website designers (I include myself in that statement)
tend to concentrate far to much on being "clever" by spending to much time on
flashy things like animated gif's, flash banner's and mouseover buttons.

We forget that the average surfer is looking for quick, relevant and helpfull
information. I, myself am very guilty of the former.

You need to remember that the average (don't know the actual figure) surfer
does not like:

1) to read long winded content,
2) like to wait for long page loads,
3) be supprised by flashy content.
4) a few more that I can't remember now.

If he does not see what he likes within the first few seconds he hit's the back
button. You need to keep his / her attention as long as possible. Your landing
page is the most important page of your whole website. You need to make it as
interesting and enticing as possible to get him to delve deeper.

Keep it cleen, simple,"colourful" and easy to navigate.
Internet users only have one sense......"sight"

I have a good friend (who doesn't even know how to switch on a computer) who
I use to test my sites. He doesn't care that it took me two days to make the
cool image map navigation. All he wants to know is... what does it do, NOT, how
did you do that. Maybe that's not a good example but I hope you understand
what I'm trying to say. Sometimes simple is better and more effective.

I guess what I'm trying to say (in a nutshell) is, and I can't stress this
enough, it does not matter how much time you spend on the back pages,
if the home page isn't welcoming enough, nobody will even look any further.

The research and commentaries say that Your Home Page is not likely to be your landing page. Most come to your site via a search engine or a referral. Direct access is another issue in which case the majority of these will come via your Home Page.

If this is the case then I would argue that every page is critical as much as your Homepage is (with the exception of supplementals such as credits, copyright, forms etc)

There is another very important aspect of website creation and that's the issue of personal satisfaction.

Many creators here have put their creative heart and soul into their work Their vision has taken them into the depths of the unknown, frustration and sometimes elation They've learned a lot. Some stepping into areas they new nothing about not even the words and ended up with creations that do exactly as they want. That's an amazing achievement and certainly something to be proud of and soemthing I admire.

Unfortunately this isn't analysed by professional reviews. Blog site reviews do this better :) It isn't what we are discussing here